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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 59712 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                              THE FLOATER
+
+                           BY KENNETH O'HARA
+
+           _Barton was unique--an absolutely self-sufficient
+           human being. The biggest problem he had in space
+           was holding on to his sanity. And he solved it by
+              altering time itself to suit his needs...._
+
+           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
+             Worlds of If Science Fiction, February 1957.
+         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
+         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
+
+
+As a Watchman in a man-made kind of observational meteor floating
+millions of miles from nowhere out among the planets, Barton had two
+main duties. To keep his sanity and to keep the watch. The second was
+simple. The gadgets all took care of themselves. All Barton did was
+send in a report in case an alarm went off indicating something was
+wrong with some gadget or other.
+
+Staying sane was supposed to be a watcher's big problem. Barton
+couldn't figure out why they were so concerned, especially the
+neuropsychologist or whatever he was, Von Ulrich, who was always
+coming around in his clinical space boat, studying Barton, asking him
+questions, giving him all kinds of tests.
+
+Once something glinted like a mote in sunlight past the observation
+port and Von Ulrich said, "That's Collins out there. Collins was here
+only a week and he put on a pressure suit and jumped into space. He's
+still rotating round and round out there."
+
+"Poor devil," Barton said.
+
+"Most of them don't even last a week out here, Barton. Six months is
+the maximum. You've been here almost a year and you're liable to start
+cracking any minute. I don't like the way things look."
+
+"I feel fine, sir."
+
+Several months later, Von Ulrich dropped by again. "How are things
+going, Barton?"
+
+"Great, sir. Just swell."
+
+"You feel comfortable, no anxiety?"
+
+"I feel fine."
+
+"You've done a fine job, Barton--so far."
+
+"Thank you, sir."
+
+"You manage to keep occupied?"
+
+"I just take it easy, sir."
+
+"I see."
+
+A few months later, Von Ulrich was back, watching Barton moulding
+something out of clay, a sort of human shape without a face. There
+were other self-amusement gimmicks, wood-working, soap-carving, movies
+and the like, but Barton preferred moulding things haphazardly out of
+clay, and sometimes reading one of the books he wasn't supposed to have
+brought along because books were no longer popular.
+
+"What were you thinking about when you moulded this thing?" Von Ulrich
+asked.
+
+"Nothing much, sir."
+
+"You must have been thinking of something?"
+
+"I guess I was thinking of a man sleeping beside a river in green grass
+with nobody for miles around. Something like that."
+
+"You weren't by any chance thinking about a dead man?"
+
+"I don't like death much."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Later on sometime, Von Ulrich dropped around again on his therapeutic
+tour of basketballs, and Martian bases, and other bases even more
+remote. Barton wondered how anyone could find the basketball drifting
+in all that blackness. Just a little ragged spheroid like a piece of
+dead slag, something like a cork bobbing in a black ocean too big even
+to bother thinking about. If no one ever found the basketball Barton
+would have been happier, because the basketball was self-sustaining and
+could go on and on for years without supplies or any human contact.
+
+"Getting a little lonely maybe?" Von Ulrich asked.
+
+"No sir."
+
+"Don't miss having people around. Your wife, your son?"
+
+Barton wanted to laugh.
+
+"Well, I'll be back to see you, Barton. I may be gone a year this time."
+
+"Happy New Year," Barton said.
+
+But it didn't seem like a year when Von Ulrich came back in his sleek
+little space-hopping clinic. It didn't seem like much of anything.
+
+"You don't find the absence of women irritating, Barton?"
+
+"I can take them or leave them, sir."
+
+"Not here. There simply aren't any at all."
+
+"I like something, but then if it isn't there, I don't miss it."
+
+"All right, Barton," Von Ulrich would say after giving Barton more
+brain-wave tests, word-association tests and making him look at
+ink-blots until his eyes turned red. "See you in a few months."
+
+"See you, sir," Barton said.
+
+And sure enough, as though he had never really been away, Von Ulrich
+would show up again, with his testing devices, his cages of mice
+and guinea pigs, and his intense searching eyes. He had a folder of
+pictures and after ink-blot tests, he had Barton look at the pictures,
+like the one of a man in deep shadow standing over a sleeping kid.
+
+"What do you see there, Barton?"
+
+"A guy standing over a kid."
+
+"What's he doing there?"
+
+"I haven't any idea."
+
+"Is the child sleeping?"
+
+"Maybe it's just pretending."
+
+"Pretending what?"
+
+"Or maybe it's dead."
+
+Von Ulrich's thin face frowned intensely. "Is the child pretending to
+be asleep, or is it dead?"
+
+"Maybe it isn't a real kid. Maybe it's a dummy."
+
+Von Ulrich's face reddened. "What's the man thinking?"
+
+"How should I know, sir."
+
+"You don't care?"
+
+"No, why should I give a damn what he's thinking?"
+
+"You tell me. Why shouldn't you?"
+
+"Because it's none of my business."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Then there was another time, during some visit or other, when Von
+Ulrich pulled another word association test.
+
+"Love."
+
+"It makes the world go round."
+
+"Blackness."
+
+"Sleep."
+
+"Alone."
+
+"Quiet."
+
+It went on for hours. Von Ulrich always seemed to be angrier because
+Barton didn't crack up, or because he insisted on turning in a perfect
+service record in the basketball.
+
+"Barton, for God's sake, don't you realize how important this watch is?
+This valuable information gathered by these recorders. Think what it
+would mean if that data fell into the hands of the Asians! What if you
+missed an alarm, or fouled up in some way, and one of these recorders
+destroyed all the data?"
+
+"Haven't I been alert all the time, sir?"
+
+"Yes! But you've been out here now for three years! Three years. No one
+can possibly stand it longer than six months. And the fact that you've
+been here for three years only means some absolutely catastrophic
+crack-up is being prolonged, built up inside."
+
+"I don't feel a bit different, sir."
+
+"There are subtle ways of cracking up."
+
+"You _want_ me to have some sort of symptom or something?"
+
+"Don't be ridiculous."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It must have been at least another year before Von Ulrich came back to
+Barton's basketball, triumphantly equipped with new devices, and waving
+a spacegram in Barton's sleepy face. Barton read it, shrugged, and let
+it drift to the floor. Von Ulrich tried to control a look almost of
+fear.
+
+"As soon as the minimum time allowed, she married again," Von Ulrich
+said. "And you pretend it means nothing?"
+
+"She never did mean much of anything, sir. I mean, she was an
+interfering kind of woman. She wouldn't let a man live."
+
+"All right, Barton. What about this? She was committing adulterous
+acts with this fellow, this Major General Woods. She was having an
+affair with him for two years before you volunteered for duty in the
+basketball."
+
+"I figured she was playing around."
+
+"You what?"
+
+"It figured."
+
+"You still pretend it meant nothing, that it means nothing now?"
+
+"I don't know what it means. What's it got to do with me now? It was
+all right, I guess. I could have gone on with it. But this is better."
+
+He dimly remembered Jean bitching all the time of an evening because
+Barton kept forgetting to take his officer's exam, and how she had to
+skimp along on an NCO's lousy salary, and so on and so forth. Very much
+the nagging kind. She wouldn't let him read either. He would tell her
+he was just sort of stupid, and had always been a drifter anyway, and
+just sort of fell into marriage and that he never had had any ambition
+particularly, and anyway big brass got ulcers and heart conditions. And
+then she would drag little Joey, the big-headed little brat into it,
+and talk about how little Joey didn't have the right kind of idealized
+image to assure him a respectable future, and little Joey would stand
+there and nod his oversized head.
+
+"What about little Joey's future?" Jean would say. "You want him to
+be just another stupid NCO? And what about his teeth? He's got to
+have his teeth straightened. They tease him at school, call him The
+Squirrel."
+
+"Yeah, Dad. You want me to be personable and saleable and high on the
+success potential scale? What about my teeth protruding?"
+
+And when Barton went into the bathroom and came back out, Jean was
+throwing all those books he'd had such a hard time finding into the
+incinerator. Barton volunteered the next day for basketball duty.
+
+It didn't even seem long ago to Barton. It was oddly like a dream that
+might have been in the past, or the future, or never at all.
+
+Von Ulrich grabbed up the spacegram and walked stiffly erect out of the
+basketball.
+
+At some time in the future, Von Ulrich showed up again with even more
+complicated tests and questions. Barton wasn't sure, but it seemed
+longer than usual that Von Ulrich was away these days. Time didn't mean
+much. It didn't have any particular use to Barton now.
+
+"Yes, yes, you have a perfect service record, Barton. Never have missed
+turning in an alarm with alacrity. And we're so damned short of men
+capable of taking this kind of duty that I can't pull you out of here
+until you make an error--or crack up. Just the same you're not fooling
+me much longer, and you won't be able to fool yourself either."
+
+Sometime later there was the business about Barton's mother. Von Ulrich
+had files on Barton going clear back to pre-natal, and maybe even
+before that.
+
+"All right, Barton, you were an only child, and you lived with your
+mother for 10 years after your father died. Then you married. What
+about the fact that Jean was a replacement for your mother?"
+
+"If she was, it never seemed that way to me."
+
+"You expected your wife to take care of you the way your mother
+did. And not demand anything of you. You expected to escape all
+responsibility and--Barton, do you consider this basketball to be your
+mother?"
+
+"What's that, sir?"
+
+"Deafness can be psychosomatic too, don't forget that. I said--but you
+heard me, answer me."
+
+"Doctor Von Ulrich, maybe I'm not normal, but--"
+
+"Then you admit the regression. That this basketball floating in space
+is a substitute for your mother's womb. You admit it!"
+
+"Why, sir, I didn't--"
+
+"But you know it's true don't you?"
+
+"I didn't say anything about it. You said it."
+
+"I said it because it's a summation of years of careful diagnosis. Look
+at the etiology. A man who never matured, never was able to accept
+responsibility as a mature adult. Always just drifting along, into one
+job, out of it, into another job, out of that, never establishing roots
+anywhere, always floating about. Unable to accept any responsibility
+for your marriage, wanting to escape it. Never able to get close, get
+involved with others, only wanting to receive, never give. What does
+it add up to? A fix, a freeze in the pre-natal stage where you were
+floating free and completely irresponsible in your mother's amniotic
+fluid. That's why you're here in the basketball."
+
+Von Ulrich's intense eyes seemed to reach out like arms to enfold
+Barton, then recoiled as Barton shrugged and said: "So, it's like my
+Ma's womb. What difference does it make what you call it as long as I'm
+happy in it and do my job?"
+
+Von Ulrich's lips moved soundlessly and then he pointed a finger into
+Barton's nose. "It makes a helluva lot of difference what you call it.
+You may be doing an efficient job here, but for the wrong reasons. I
+wish I could recommend, on the basis of my diagnosis, that you agree to
+a month's checkup in the Martian Clinic but--"
+
+Barton interrupted. "I'm glad you can't. I wouldn't like that as much
+as this. Maybe your reports won't cut much ice as long as I keep up the
+perfect service record."
+
+Von Ulrich's jaws were ridged. "Damn the military system! Damn a system
+that says a man has to stay up here till he's dead or crazy or makes a
+mistake!"
+
+"But Doc, I like it. I'm happier here, I think. Maybe I wasn't normal
+on Earth. Maybe I'm not normal here, or maybe being abnormal on Earth
+makes me normal here. I'm happy and I do my work."
+
+Von Ulrich backed away a few steps, then turned and ran out and slammed
+the sliding panel. He didn't say goodbye to Barton this time, or that
+he would be back. But Barton took no hope from Von Ulrich's lack of
+ceremony.
+
+Von Ulrich did come back, several times. Barton was sleeping a great
+deal now. He didn't putter with the gimmicks much, not even the clay,
+and he'd about read the books out. He slept a lot and yet there was a
+funny heavy feeling as though he never did quite sleep or never quite
+woke up either. But it was a good feeling because when a man was too
+sound asleep he didn't enjoy it because he didn't know anything about
+it. This was sort of in-between, and Barton loved it. Sometimes he
+would blink his eyes and see Von Ulrich standing there, probably with
+some new testing device, or with a notebook open, or with a helmet with
+wires to attach to Barton's skull to record something.
+
+Another time he thought some stranger was there and then he realized
+that Von Ulrich's face was sagging and wrinkled and that his hair was
+thinner and gray.
+
+"Why not have groups of watchers if you're so worried about one being
+alone?"
+
+"We tried that, it was worse, Barton. They killed one another."
+
+"Well, sir, my being alone is a good thing then, in that respect."
+
+"Have you ever thought that you would kill yourself?"
+
+"Why no, sir. Why should I?"
+
+"Because you hate yourself. In a society, people can externalize their
+self-hate. They can hate society, other people. You can only turn your
+hate inward, on yourself."
+
+"But I don't hate anything, sir."
+
+"You do!"
+
+"But, sir, I don't."
+
+"Barton, I said you hate yourself. It's in all the charts, everything.
+We all hate ourselves to some extent, why should you be different from
+everybody else?"
+
+"Why not, sir?"
+
+Von Ulrich pressed his hand over his eyes, and walked out.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was like a dream with a shadow drifting in and out and in again, and
+it was Von Ulrich, looking so much older this time. "It's been almost
+fifteen years, Barton. Fifteen years."
+
+"So? Fifteen years earth time. What does that mean here to me, sir?"
+Barton smiled, closed his eyes. "What does time matter in your mother's
+womb?"
+
+"You've developed a definite measurable syndrome, Barton. Excessive
+lethargy and a sleeping compulsion. Eventually it will destroy your
+efficiency as a watcher if it hasn't already."
+
+Von Ulrich set off an alarm and in less than four seconds Barton was
+over there sending a report out to the authorities, a report Von Ulrich
+immediately canceled as being false.
+
+Von Ulrich seemed to dissolve in a haze of fading light.
+
+"Is that you, Von Ulrich, sir?"
+
+"I'm afraid so, Barton. Back again."
+
+Von Ulrich sat down in the contour chair and filled a pipe.
+
+"Remember, Barton when you took your test for basketball duty? The dead
+man's float?"
+
+"I sort of remember it, sir. It was fun."
+
+Von Ulrich flinched. "Fun? I've gone over that report on your test,
+Barton. It doesn't make sense. What the hell are you anyway? A damned
+freak, a mutation, an alien in disguise?"
+
+The dead man's float had been pleasant for Barton, that was all he
+could remember about it. They had taken off all Barton's clothes
+so that nothing touched Barton's body but a blacked-out head-mask
+through which to get air. He had been put in a tank of water at body
+temperature upside down and floated there. There was no sensation.
+It had been one of the happiest times of his life. Like floating on
+air. Hearing nothing, seeing nothing, feeling nothing except his own
+existence. Not even able to tell which was right side up, or right side
+down, cross-wise or whatnot. He had been told to keep still, but nobody
+had needed to tell him to do that.
+
+"The first two or three hours of that dead man's float is a good test
+for basketball duty, Barton. It's a kind of final isolation of the
+human organism. Normal human beings can take a couple of hours of it
+usually. They like it. Every human being to some extent likes to return
+to the womb. But after a couple of hours most human beings start going
+to pieces, short-circuiting. The reason is the deprivation of any
+outside stimuli. Something has to feed in through some source--some
+reception source--the skin, ears, nose, the eyes. These things feeding
+in, they orient a person, tells him when he's thinking, feeling, gives
+him stimuli for additional thinking. With all these turned off, a
+person is simply left with a closed circuit. This begins to go round
+and round and distorts and magnifies and ruptures the whole thinking
+process. The floater becomes anxious, then very anxious, then he begins
+having hallucinations, finally becomes completely disoriented. All this
+happens to a normal human being inside, at the most, three or four
+hours. No human being should be able to remain sane after four hours of
+the dead man's float, Barton. But remember how long you lay there in
+that tank?"
+
+"I didn't care how long it was."
+
+"Three days," Von Ulrich said. "The neurophysiologist in charge there
+kept checking your reaction and finally he had to take you out of the
+tank, not because you were short-circuiting, but because he was. The
+impression was that you would have been delighted with the prospect of
+doing the dead man's float forever."
+
+"I don't remember it being any special time. It was like a dream, sir,
+you know."
+
+"I don't know, but I'm trying to find out." Von Ulrich sighed and
+looked through the spaceport at blackness. "Out here I sometimes find
+myself wondering what normalcy really is. Things sometimes veer toward
+the dangerously relativistic." He sat there in the pure one hundred
+percent silence of the basketball while it accumulated. "There's one
+thing we've always insisted no human being could tolerate, Barton.
+Isolation. Sullivan said that a single minute of complete isolation
+would kill a human being. And you've been in a dead man's float for
+almost twenty-two years."
+
+"Twenty-two years, sir?"
+
+"Doesn't mean a thing to you does it?"
+
+"Well, sir, it doesn't seem to have had any time in it. I was just
+here."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was another time, like all the other times, except that Von
+Ulrich seemed much older, his hair thinner and now all of it gray.
+There seemed to be something tired about him, except for the brightness
+coming from behind his intense questioning eyes.
+
+Suddenly he asked, "Barton, what time is it?"
+
+Barton glanced at the chrono. "Quarter of four, sir."
+
+"Keep looking."
+
+After a while Barton said, "Still quarter of four."
+
+"That chrono hasn't been working for three years. I stopped it three
+years ago. You haven't even noticed it, have you?"
+
+"I guess not, sir."
+
+"Take a long look out there, Barton. Nothing to see but blackness. No
+feeling of distance. Imagine your mind going out there, exploring,
+trying to fit in somewhere. You look out there, you project your
+thoughts out there, nothing comes back. So what time is it? Where are
+you in all this? There was nothing out here until you came along, not
+even any meaningful kind of time out here. _But there has to be some
+feeling of time, Barton!_"
+
+Barton felt a tinge of uneasiness. He looked out. It looked cold.
+
+"What time is it, Barton?"
+
+"What difference does it make?"
+
+"Your body has to know. Your body works on a timetable doesn't it?
+Your lungs, expanding, contracting regularly. Your heart beating so
+many times regularly--_every minute_. Your blood circulating regularly.
+Look here, Barton. You're a product of a specific environment, on a big
+scale, call it Earth, the Solar System. You claim it means nothing,
+time means nothing. But your heart beats regularly so many times every
+minute and that's why you're alive. Where did the arbitrary rhythm of
+that beat come from, Barton? You were born with it. It isn't anything
+you control, or had anything to do with developing, is it? What's a
+minute? On Earth, it has meaning. Sixty seconds part of a minute. Sixty
+minutes make up an hour. What's an hour but a segment of a 24 hour day.
+Where does that figure come from? The Earth, Barton. It rotates on its
+axis approximately every 24 hours. 24 hours make a day, seven days a
+week, so many weeks in a month, twelve months make up a year. A year,
+Barton, the Earth rotates around the sun once a year."
+
+For the first time in the basketball, Barton began to feel some
+discomfort. He closed his eyes and while they were closed he became
+acutely aware of his heart beating, and the expanding and contracting
+of his lungs.
+
+"You claim there is no Earth any more, Barton. No Earth rotating on its
+axis, no Earth rotating around the sun. No sun, no moon, no time. Why
+should your heart go on beating regularly so many times a minute--when
+there's nothing out here that gives a minute any meaning? Has time
+stopped here? Is there any time here, Barton, when there's nothing here
+to turn time into measurable segments? How can your heart beat so many
+times a minute, a year, a lifetime if there's no such thing here any
+more?"
+
+Barton slowly opened his eyes. His hands felt wet.
+
+"This basketball doesn't rotate, Barton. Doesn't move toward, away
+from, or around anything. It's moving with the Galaxy but that can't
+mean anything to you can it? Listen, Barton, your body operates largely
+on an unconscious level, but what if unconsciously your heart, your
+lungs, your bodily functions start to lose their conditioned memory of
+the Earth's rotation, the regularity of its movement on its axis and
+around the Sun that gave your birth? What will happen then, Barton?
+What happens to your heart-beat if your heart begins to forget how long
+a minute is?"
+
+Von Ulrich leaned down close to Barton's damp face.
+
+"What time is it, Barton?"
+
+Barton started to look out the spaceport again, but jerked his head in
+the other direction. He didn't want to look out. Von Ulrich waited, but
+Barton didn't say anything. Finally, with a tight smile on his face,
+Von Ulrich got up and went to the door.
+
+"I'll see you again, Barton. Some time."
+
+Barton started. "Wait--don't go," he started to say. But something
+constricted in his throat and he hardly even moved his lips, and no
+sound came out at all.
+
+He saw the cold streak flash past the view port. It was Von Ulrich's
+clinic. Quickly he looked toward the wall. The chrono was gone. Von
+Ulrich had taken it with him. There was a watch, a wrist watch. Barton
+ran around looking for the wrist watch, but he couldn't find it.
+
+When he lay down again and closed his eyes, he couldn't rest. He
+couldn't sleep. His heart beat got louder, and after a while that was
+all he could hear, and when he tried to figure out how many times a
+minute his heart was, or was not, beating, he couldn't.
+
+What time was it?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The war in which all of Earth's outposts were involved, lasted thirty
+years. The basketballs were forgotten for a long time, and when they
+were remembered again, a special search was rewarded by finding only
+two of them. In the first basketball there was no trace of the watchman
+who had been abandoned in it almost half a century before, and no
+indication of what had happened to him.
+
+In the second one, Von Ulrich found Barton still lying peacefully on
+the couch, looking hardly any different than when Von Ulrich had walked
+out and left him there.
+
+Von Ulrich, who had been retired for a long time and who was unable to
+get about except in a wheel-chair, had requested inclusion among the
+search boat's personnel. No one had figured out why because even if
+they found any basketballs, it was certain that no one would be alive
+on any of them, let alone anyone needing Von Ulrich's specialized
+talents.
+
+Von Ulrich had hoped that Barton's basketball would be found and when
+it was found, he insisted on being carried through the interconnecting
+airlock into the spheroid that looked on the outside like a dead piece
+of slag.
+
+The ship's medical officer, a man young and rather stiff, was shocked
+at first to see Barton lying there, but he had a ready explanation as
+he used his stethescope. "Must have sprung a leak and let in preserving
+frigidity."
+
+"But then how did the leak repair itself and the temperature return to
+normal?" Von Ulrich asked as he studied Barton's smooth, unaged face.
+
+"Dead," the medical officer said, and he dropped the stethescope back
+into his case.
+
+Von Ulrich gripped the husks of his hands together to keep them from
+rattling, and he smiled slowly. "Barton didn't like death much."
+
+Zeiger the medical officer looked puzzled. "You know this man?"
+
+"A little. I tried to know him better but a war intervened. His name is
+Harry Barton and he was assigned to duty in this basketball fifty-three
+years and about four months ago."
+
+Zeiger turned away as though to hide an embarrassed reaction.
+
+"You think I speak out of some mental senility, Zeiger? You know this
+man isn't dead."
+
+"He has to be dead."
+
+"Not Barton. He would hardly approve of your diagnosis. He never
+cared much for diagnosis anyway. This is Harry Barton, and I've
+preserved--for personal reasons--his file. I have it with me. You
+want to check his fingerprints? You'll find it's the same man who was
+assigned to duty here fifty-three years ago."
+
+"There's no heart-beat," Zeiger insisted, but not very enthusiastically.
+
+"Better give Barton a more thorough check," Von Ulrich said.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Barton's heart was beating all right. Once every thirty-seven hours
+and fourteen seconds. Regularly, strongly, very slowly, but without a
+tremor. The electroencephalograph registered brain waves of regular
+rhythm, but of quite low amplitude. But with a frequency slowed
+to a point so far below normalcy that it took a week to establish
+recognizable delta, theta, alpha and higher frequency wave-forms. Using
+the electronic stroboscope to induce changes in brain-wave reaction by
+flicker got results. But the frequency didn't change. When they forced
+Barton's eyes open and used the stroboscope, a slight change in theta
+rhythm signified some irritation, but it was mild.
+
+"Barton never hated anybody," Von Ulrich said.
+
+It was slow work though, testing Barton's reactions. It was five days
+after the stroboscopic stimulation before the termination of the brain
+reactive crescendo. Another week before theta rhythm returned to normal.
+
+"... so I finally decided," Von Ulrich told Zeiger, "that Barton was
+unique--he was the impossible. The absolutely self-sufficient human
+being, needing nothing but himself. I was getting older and I figured
+there was a chance I might not get back and the war threat and so
+forth. I was worried about leaving Barton. But only for one reason."
+
+Von Ulrich explained his concern about what might have happened if
+Barton's autonomic nervous system had lost its identification with the
+time factor that had conditioned it.
+
+"I figured Barton was absolutely self-sufficient, except for the time
+factor. He had to have something outside himself relatively to which
+his organs could function in a necessary regularity."
+
+Zeiger poured himself another shot of rum and drank it quickly.
+
+"So he's still here," Zeiger said. "We'll have to take him to the
+Martian Base for observation."
+
+"Why not leave him here? Barton has a perfect service record. He's
+never missed an alarm."
+
+"But in this condition--"
+
+"Let's see." Von Ulrich set off an alarm. Barton moved, but it took him
+almost a week to move a few inches.
+
+"That's too slow," Zeiger insisted.
+
+Von Ulrich said, "I'll turn in a complete report on Barton. If the
+authorities want to have him removed, all right. But maybe they won't.
+Maybe they'll decide they have a laboratory here for the study of
+a human being that's more important than whatever's being absorbed
+by those recorders. Barton is the thing to watch. I call him the
+'Adaptable,' because I believe he can adapt to anything, fit himself
+into any situation, any kind of environmental circumstance, if he's not
+interfered with too much, if he's given even a slight chance. You see
+he altered his metabolism in order to relate to a different, highly
+personalized time. And he hasn't aged much either. God knows how long
+he will live, Zeiger, with such a slowed metabolism. And not only
+that--who knows what unique kind of personalized time he's developing
+there inside himself? Who knows if we can even make a human comparison?"
+
+"But how did he set this new arbitrary time of his? The heart beating
+every thirty-seven hours and fourteen seconds?"
+
+Von Ulrich looked through the spaceport, and then pointed when the
+pressure suit drifted past with the long-dead Collins perfectly
+preserved in it and still looking out through the face plate.
+
+"That way," Von Ulrich said. "Collins is our little human satellite out
+there, and he rotates around the basketball once every thirty-seven
+hours and fourteen seconds."
+
+"Well I'll be damned," Zeiger said.
+
+"Of our time, that is," Von Ulrich said. "But our time doesn't mean
+anything to Barton now."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Floater, by Kenneth O'Hara
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 59712 ***